Maybe, Probably, Certainly

Summary: Coffee Shop AU. Part-time barista Danny Fenton is enamored by a frequent customer, the wealthy yet modest daughter of local millionaire Pamela Manson. (D/S).

Genre: Romance/Friendship

Characters: [Danny Fenton, Sam Manson]

Word count: 2,981

Author's notes: I've been craving a Danny Phantom coffee shop AU for a while now, and I haven't been able to find one yet. Let me know if there's one; I'd love to read it (and also make sure I'm not unintentionally plagiarizing someone—eek). This took me over a year! Abandoned this piece then picked it up in order to avoid studying for the SATs.

Disclaimer: Danny Phantom belongs to Butch Hartman, and I definitely did not create the idea of coffee shop AUs.

Every day (except Sundays), she arrives in the small café at around seven in the evening. Sometimes she comes a bit earlier, sometimes a bit later. But she always comes.

There are only four coats that she likes to wear. Two are black, with one reaching her knees while the other is longer; another is grey-ish, leaning towards a blacker tone; her last is a deep, royal purple. She rotates them every three or four days, but when the weather isn't too frosty, she opts for a black university sweatshirt instead. (That's how Danny figured out that she studied at APU.)

When she comes in, she makes a beeline for her table like it's routine, embedded into her system. (It eventually really is.) She sets down her backpack and laptop bag, walking to the counter with her black purse in hand. (Danny always steals glances to her table while she's away from it—just to make sure no one snatches her things.)

On days when she sees her table occupied, she instead sits at one of the stools on the counter (albeit very begrudgingly) until the person who stole her spot leaves. Danny doesn't know whether or not he hates it when this happens—he gets to see her more closely, but then she gets to see him, the perpetually flustered and clumsy Danny, more closely, as he spills milk on his faded sneakers and scorches his fingers on the coffee. (There was this one time he yelped out when he burned the tip of his finger accidentally, and she laughed at him, hiding behind her coffee cup futilely. Danny looked over for a second at her laughter before blushing and scampering away to finish the drink he was fixing up.)

A constant in her orders is an espresso; she always mixes in one packet of brown sugar and removes the lid for a minute to let it cool. And every time she takes off the cover, she closes her eyes to inhale the warm aroma of coffee and milk.

Other than her coffee, she always orders food to go with her drink. There are only a few things on the menu that she likes. One of her favorites is their basil and tomato sandwich. But whenever that's not available, she sighs and gets a bagel instead. (If Danny's at the counter when this happens, he looks down at his shoes apologetically and begins to mumble when he talks.)

When she's done paying, she gets her coffee and goes back to her seat. It's one of their nicer spots; it only has one soft chair in front of the small coffee table. (It originally had two, but Danny and co. decided to remove the other since it was hardly touched anyway.) It's situated in the corner nearest the counter, where the lighting is dimmer and there are less people to bother her.

A minute or so later, someone comes up to bring her food to her. (Tucker always sends Danny with the tray, well aware of how much Danny likes to step out of the counter to go to her table.)

Her MacBook is set up by the time the tray comes over, and she slides it to the side of the table to make room for her plate. (There are days when she smiles and looks at Danny to thank him, and there are days when she's too exhausted to smile—just a slight nod and an incoherent thank you. Either way, Danny tries to put on a cheery attitude when he sets her tray down.)

She never eats with her hands. She will always use her fork and knife, probably not to get oil on her keyboard. She eats very slowly, taking over thirty minutes just to finish her meal, which isn't much when you think about it. She always stops in between bites to type something up or to peruse some pages of her textbook. (She reads law books, Danny notices after a few weeks. She's planning to take environmental law, she tells him a few months later when he asks.)

Even when she's done eating and drinking, she stays for a few more hours (often until closing) to finish up whatever studying it is she seems to be doing. (Danny wonders why she couldn't just study at home—it's not like she lived in a dump or anything. She was a Manson for crying out loud. She probably had all the room and comfort she needed at home for studying—not that Danny was annoyed by her lingering. The thought just constantly floated in his mind.)

When it's around ten, she goes back up to the counter to order something again. On cold days, it's tea, while in rare warmer nights, she gets a blended drink—again, she's very picky, asking for soy milk and no whipped cream. (After some time, she doesn't even need to tell Danny. He just says in a smug tone hazelnut, soy, hold the whipped cream while Sam rolls her eyes.)

Then she'll continue her work, her yawns growing more frequent as the hours pass. (One time when the circles under her eyes seemed more drastic than usual, Danny set an espresso on her table and ran off back into the counter before she could react. It's on me, written on the paper cup in the skinny handwriting Sam recognized so well as Danny's. I thought you might need it. Midterms suck, huh? The handwriting grew sloppier as Sam rotated the cup to read the message. She peered over to where Danny was working, and he seemed to be feigning concentration on whatever drink he was mixing up—his stupid grin gave it away. She made sure to leave him a big tip before leaving.)

At first, Sam's embarrassed whenever she stays at the shop until closing; she feels like a squatter sitting in there all night. But when she forgets to keep track of the time, Danny always taps her on the shoulder to say sorry, we're closing up the shop now, you should go home and get some rest now. He says it with that warm and boyish grin he always wears when he talks to people (but most especially to Sam). When they grow more comfortable with each other, Danny always helps her pack up her books and opens the door out for her, like a gentleman and all. And it always leaves Sam feeling warmer than any coffee or tea she drinks at the café.

She learns a few things about Danny, too, like the way the tip of his tongue's always sticking out between his teeth when he isn't speaking. Or how he can write with both of his hands in the same tall, skinny handwriting that's almost always used to write her name onto her drink. (There was this day she wanted to punch him when he wrote Samantha in this disgusting, curly handwriting and called out her name in a mock-posh tone: One medium Americano for a Miss Samantha? She glared daggers at him when she snatched the drink from his hands—but there was laughter in her eyes, Danny saw.)

But on normal days, whenever she goes up to the counter to get her drink, it's always Danny who hands it to her—whether he's working the register or brewing up the drinks. He always makes sure to give her two packets of brown sugar and a spoon (not those stirrers because she likes to take her first sips with a spoon before setting it down to drink the rest of it from the cup). And he always gives her one sheet of tissue paper even though he clearly knows she prefers to have two; so she always has to go up to him and ask for another one—not that either of them mind.

There are an endless number of subtleties of Danny's that catch Sam's eye: his work visor is always lopsided, he wears a Nike watch every day, he only says good evening to people who look over thirty-five—she could go on. But no mannerisms of Danny's are more interesting to her than how he gives her a large when she clearly paid for a medium, or how he scribbles short messages like u look nice or rough day? inconspicuously onto her cups before handing them to her while his co-workers aren't looking. (Sam smiled when she saw a string of digits on her cup one day.)

Danny purposely works the register more slowly when she's paying (it's not like there are a lot of customers anyway) and Sam likes to pretend to dig around her purse for her wallet even though it's right there under her hand. They're both aware of what the other is doing, and neither minds; as long as they get to speak without having to use ridiculous stealth methods. Nonetheless, they don't get much out of those minute-long conversations at the register—just the customary hey, how's it going? or mindless chatter about school or the occasional compliment.

It's funny to Sam how they act as if they've known each other for years when in reality, they hardly know anything about each other, other than the silly details; she knows that he likes crunchy peanut butter and uses earphones rather than headphones, and he knows that spring is her favorite season and that she really wants a pet dog even though her grandmother's allergic. But she doesn't know if he has any siblings or what part of town he lives in, and he doesn't know why she's always wearing black or why she's always at the café even though she doesn't like majority of what's on the menu… they don't know anything about each other outside the wooden walls of the shop.

Until Danny asks.

It's midnight during spring break, and Danny's the one to take out the trash. He doesn't make it a point to get the job done quickly, seeing that he's lingering on a spot on the sidewalk where his pushover boss wouldn't see him.

A car parked on the sidewalk across him rolls down its window, and that familiar voice calls out, Hey, get back to work! in an affectionate tone.

Danny shakes his head and ignores what she just said.

Hey, Sam! What? Let's have coffee together! No, not coffee! …is that a no? It's a yes, you idiot, but I don't want coffee! Oh! Okay, let's have ice cream then! I'm vegan, don't you remember? Oh, yeah! Frozen yogurt? That's not vegan, either. Dammit! What can you eat? I don't want to go out with you anymore, you ass! No, Sam, I was kidding, I'm so sorr— I was joking, geez. Oh, phew. Let's go to the park. I know a good spot. The park it is. I'll text you! Alright… thanks. No prob.

Needless to say, they go home feeling better than they'd expected.

They stay there longer than they'd planned to; it was just supposed to be brunch, but they ended up staying on the grass until three (Danny missed a class, but he didn't care anyway).

There's this spot in the park where a hill overlooks a good part of the town. No one seems to know about it, Sam explains. It's always been her spot ever since she discovered it a few years ago. (Danny blushed at the thought of it's being their spot. And then he mentally slapped himself.)

That's where they eat. Sam has a picnic mat hidden behind the huge tree there, which she changes every week or so when it gets dirty. Danny leans against the tree with his legs stretched in front of him while Sam lies flat on the ground perpedicular to Danny (she wishes her head could be in his lap instead of the rock-hard surface). At first, the things they talk about are the same, mostly because that's all they ever talk about: essentially nothing. He's ranting to her about this customer who dared to flirt her way into a discount on drinks for her and her friends (they both know he only does that for Sam). Then she's complaining about her professor who set an impossible deadline for her thesis.

Danny laughs but his heart isn't in the conversation. As he and Sam alternately pluck grapes off their stem, he gently steers the topic from meaningless complaints to subjects of a more personal nature; Sam's eyes light up when Danny tells her about Cujo, his pug that his parents adopted a few weeks after Danny's birth, so they basically grew up together; he tells her about his other sibling (this time a human), Jazz, who's working on her doctorate in Yale because she's always naturally been an overachiever (an antithesis of Danny—that was a term Danny learned in that English class where he always got away with eating Reese's pieces because the teacher had terrible vision).

This, in turn, allows Sam to open up. Danny learns a lot of things about her that day.

He learns that she lived in San Francisco until she was nine, where she hated the hills but loved the crisp weather where she didn't have to wear stuffy coats every time she went out. Then her grandmother, who lived on her own in Amity Park at the time, broke her hip when she tripped in the bathroom during the height of Sam's third grade summer, when her parents had just installed a swing on her favorite tree in the backyard that her dad had to literally pry her off so that he could get her on their flight to Amity Park. (My parents may be head-over-heels consumed in their money, but they'd literally drop everything for Grandma.) Their one month stay turned into two then three. Sam and Grandma clicked so easily that she didn't even remember her swing in that backyard in California anymore. Then one weekend, she and her mother flew back to San Francisco to pack Sam's favorite clothes and books to ship to Amity Park so that they could settle in and buy the huge ass mansion in a subdivision Danny jokingly refers to as Calabassholes because the kids from Sam's neighborhood were absolute jerks in high school (when Danny mentions the name Paulina, Sam's mouth forms into a solid O before she goes into a tirade about that nightmarish girl who used to throw the most ear-splitting, headache-inducing parties during high school that always ended in drunk boys throwing up on her curb).

Sam learns that Danny's an astronomy major at UAP; he wasted his first two years at college thinking that becoming an accountant was a safe and normal aspiration, a far cry from his parents' career path of paranormal biology. It took a wake-up call from his best friend, Tucker, to realize that Danny was a Fenton and was never destined to pursue a course so mundane when he could be the Neil Armstrong of Mars (or Buzz Aldrin—Danny didn't want to dream too big). In reality, he says, he knows that he'll only go as far as screwing bolts into the rocketship where the actual Neil Armstrong of Mars would be, or hosting some lame astronomy podcast that he'd record in a dingy apartment while trying to block the sounds of his roommate's snoring coming from the adjacent room. (He says these to make Sam laugh, and she does, much to Danny's pleasure as seen through how he stops plucking grapes for the rest of the time to watch her toss her head and her shoulders bounce with laughter.)

He learns about the day in middle school she decided to become a goth (she recoils in shame as she recounts the scenic-punk-rocker look that she donned every day for two years). She learns about how Danny and Tucker were the geeks in high school because Tuck had a strange devotion to gadgets (his locker looked like a shrine) and because Danny was the scrawny little brother of Jazz Fenton who wasn't as smart or attractive (Back then! Danny joked. The second wave of puberty turned me into a total looker. Sam didn't deny it.).

When they part ways at three o'clock (four hours lying on a hill!), they know that there were many more conversations on that hill with cheap juice packs and grapes to follow.

Sam still comes every day to the coffee shop as usual (not so much for the coffee, but more for something or someone else), and Danny is always there to bring her food to her table (and it takes him longer to return to the counter than with other customers).

One night, after Danny's co-worker leaves and Danny is the one to close up the shop, Sam is left there with him. They have fun washing dishes inside and seeing who can make the biggest bubble with the soap. (Sam wins.)

She rides in the car with him to the park, and they race up the hill but agree to give up halfway because the day has been long and they're too worn out for this. His arm around her shoulder, they walk up the rest of the way at a leisurely pace and flop down on the grass without even bothering to lay down the picnic mat anymore. They eventually take it out and use it as a blanket even though it probably has specks of soil and grass on it. They're freezing even though they've got their jackets on, and they can see the clouds form whenever they laugh (which happens a lot). Danny regrets not bringing coffee from the shop, but Sam replies that she never really liked the coffee there anyway.

They learn many things about each other. They learn that maybe (probably) (certainly), they can learn to love each other.